Lacie USB Keys Open Up a World of Frustration

LaCie have made it their mission to come up with creative and entertaining products that allow customers to unintentionally destroy or misplace their data as easily as possible. After releasing their coin-shaped CurrenKey flash-drives, LaCie now present to us flash drives that look like keys. Prepare to lose data in the name of industrial design.

The iamaKey is the tough cooKey in the bunch. It’s water- and scratch-resistant, and its protective edges ensure that you’ll never insert the drive with the wrong side up, but it won’t prevent you from attempting to do so anyway. It will also not prevent you from trying to start your car with it after a beer or six.

The iamaKey comes in 4Gb and 8Gb versions. The 4Gb costs $18 USD while the 8Gb costs $28 USD. If iamaKey is a flash drive for the toughies, there’s itsaKey, a flash drive for trendy people. itsaKey is weirdly shaped, and it offers less protection compared to iamaKey. Trendy indeed.

It’s not exactly fragile because it’s coated with nickel, but there’s no mention of water- or scratch-resistance on its product page. The upside is that itsaKey is cheaper. The 4Gb version costs $15 USD and the 8Gb costs $24 USD. Rounding out the product line is PassKey, a useful little fella that eats your microSD cards, essentially turning them into USB drives.

In other words, PassKey is a microSD card reader, not a flash disk. It has no data capacity of its own. But if you have a bunch of old microSD cards then you only have to shell out $10 USD for the PassKey. Transfer speeds will obviously be slower on the PassKey: it only goes up to 40Mbits/s compared to 480Mbits/s max on the iamaKey and itsaKey.

You can buy all three at LaCie’s shop; I’ve linked the product names to their corresponding product pages. I see a LaCie imaPieceofTrashKey in the future.

Comments (2):

I think people would misplace there flash drives more then there keys. Keys are some thing you always pick up before you leave the house and so on. I have lost two flash drives in the last 3 years but still have my keys.